


The Client Chair: "His Last Vow," Moffat Women, And Me Being So Very Done Right Now

by PlaidAdder



Series: Sherlock Meta [3]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: F/M, Gen, His Last Vow, Irene Adler - Freeform, M/M, Meta, Nonfiction, Spoilers, doctor who series 5-7, moffat women, river song - Freeform, tasha lem - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-03
Updated: 2014-02-03
Packaged: 2018-01-11 02:12:47
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,395
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1167405
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PlaidAdder/pseuds/PlaidAdder
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which, whilst responding to "His Last Vow," I count the ways in which I am fed up with Steven Moffat's obsession with sexy assassin ninja women.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Client Chair: "His Last Vow," Moffat Women, And Me Being So Very Done Right Now

**TASHA: They engineered a psychopath to kill you.**

**ELEVEN: Totally married her.**

**\--"Time of the Doctor," Steven Moffat**

Well. I've seen "His Last Vow" now.

Short term: It was entertaining.

Long term: I don't like it. I'm not sure that anyone who has not submitted to series 5-7 of _Doctor Who_ will fully understand why and how much I don't like it.

I will endeavor to explain.

Before moving on to address the major long-term problems introduced by HLV's plot, let me first say this: It had its moments. I think possibly my favorite one was the moment at which John, finally catching Sherlock's drift, sets down the client chair and explains to Mary what it is and what it will mean when she sits down in it. But as it happens, that moment is also a perfect crystallization of many of the things I hate about what Steven Moffat just did to Mary Morstan's character. We will come back to this moment later. 

Many of the other things that were probably meant to be Big Moments fizzled for me because I had predicted so many of them in advance. As soon as I discovered that they were planning to introduce a character named Charles Augustus Magnusson in the same series in which Mary would be introduced,[ I predicted that Mary would be one of his victims](http://plaidadder.tumblr.com/post/68091350617/all-right-so-can-we-talk-about-this-man), and that Mary be discovered by Sherlock and John in Magnusson's office trying to kill him. As soon as she recognized the skip code in "The Empty Hearse" [I had my suspicions](http://plaidadder.tumblr.com/post/73920689174/the-empty-hearse-i-have-seen-it-at-last). Not too long after seeing "Sign of Three," I predicted that based on what had been revealed about her, she would turn out to be either [a government agent or a spy](http://plaidadder.tumblr.com/post/74943376210/things-about-mary-empty-hearse-and-sign-of-three). I admit I had not predicted assassin. I was kind of thinking maybe Mycroft had assigned John to her, as a way of getting him through his grief and keeping him alive, and she got overinvolved. 

How did I predict all this? Because I am psychic? Because I can out-Sherlock Sherlock? No. Because I've read "The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton," and because there are few things in the world more predictable than Steven Moffat's attempts to create a 'strong female character' worthy of mating with one of his surrogates, excuse me, male protagonists. I've met Irene Adler. I've met River Song. I know what Moffat thinks it takes to make a woman interesting enough to keep around. And that's all you need to know to predict most of this supposedly 'bombshell' plot.

In "The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton," Holmes has a client, one Lady Eva, who is engaged to be married but whose love letters to an earlier flame have fallen into the hands of the odious Charles Augustus Milverton. Holmes, whose disgust for Milverton is expressed in a famous passage which Moffat more or less lifted for Sherlock's dialogue, has agreed to negotiate with Milverton to try to reach a price that his client might actually be able to pay. Nothing works, and Milverton leaves, with Holmes thwarted and furious. Holmes then dedicates the next several months to casing Milverton's house--with the help of Milverton's housekeeper, to whom he becomes engaged--and finally announces to Watson that he plans to break in and steal his client's letters. Watson insists on going along, over Holmes's objections. The break-in goes smoothly; but when they reach Milverton's office they discover he's up and about. They hide behind the curtains. A mysterious woman comes in, reveals herself to be one of Milverton's victims, accuses him of killing her husband by breaking his heart, empties her gun into Milverton, and skedaddles. Holmes and Watson then jump out, burn all the stuff in Milverton's safe, and flee for their lives. Watson is nearly nabbed by one of the policemen who arrive on the scene, but manages to escape undetected. Lestrade comes around the next day to ask Holmes to help solve Milverton's murder. Holmes declines, saying that Milverton's crimes "justify private revenge," and that "my sympathies are with the criminals rather than the victim."

So if you know this, and you know Moffat, then you know that the woman they surprise in the act of killing Milverton is going to be Mary. Why? Because Moffat loves gun-toting psychopathic ninja assassin women. He thinks they're hot. He thinks you can never have too many. He thinks, in fact, that being a psychopathic assassin is one of the few things that makes a woman worthy of marriage. Or so I assume, from the fact that Eleven falls in love with and marries the psychopath who was raised to kill him, and that Sherlock's only possible romantic/erotic attachment with a woman (again, if you konw the story, it's very obvious that Jeanine is the update of Milverton's housekeeper; Moffat even takes care to inform us that Sherlock is still a virgin, so The Woman's dominance is not threatened) was to a double-crossing professional dominatrix who spends a lot of her on-screen time naked and prefers the riding crop but is no slouch with a pistol, and that John was apparently attracted to Mary purely because he somehow detected on a subconscious level that she was really a psychopathic gun-slinging sexy ninja assassin.

Look. I understand a lot of people find the whole sexy woman action hero thing fascinating. I don't, though. I don't like guns, I don't like assassins, I don't like extralegal killing in general, I don't like how cool my whole culture finds guns and assassins and extralegal killings, I actually really viscerally hate the way American culture glorifies violence and makes it an object of almost erotic fascination, so that's Reason One why I am done with La Femme Moffita. But I recognize that I am in the minority on that one.

Reason Two is basically, this: Why is it not enough that Mary was--as she was introduced in "Empty Hearse" and "Sign of Three"--a clever, funny, good-humored, brave woman who is devoted to John, likes his crazy friend Sherlock well enough to make room for him, and is curious and steadfast enough to make a good third member of the investigative team? Why does she ALSO have to be a psychopath who stole a dead woman's identity, has never told John the truth about anything, kills people for a living, and shot Sherlock in the chest? Jesus, Moffat, do you find women THAT boring that you have to invent all this bullshit just to make it credible that BAMF!John would be willing to spend his life with her? 

I wouldn't bring up my own fic here were it not for the fact that I think about 98% of the people who are reading this have already read it, but let me say this: In the review of "Sign of Three" I said that they were putting Mary into the position I had created for Harry and that this was the right thing to do. Well, when I created Harry, it was very important to me that she NOT be an action hero. I thought that what was interesting about her was that she was a reasonably intelligent and kind of troubled but mostly ordinary woman trying to put her life back together. I thought she would be  _more_ interesting to people than some improbably athletic contract killer who ran around in black leather. But again, I'm evidently in the minority here.

Even so, I don't think that Mary actually, now, does occupy that position, despite everything that "His Last Vow" would seem to imply, and that brings me to Reason Three, which brings us back to the client chair.

Because this is the thing about Les Femmes Moffita. They can kill as many people as they want, as sexily as they know how; but their agency within the storylines we see is always fatally compromised by their love for the hero. River Song, for instance. Great character, when she started out. Loved her in "Silence in the Library" and "Forest of the Dead." Not pleased to discover that a) she's the daughter of Eleven's companions b) she was raised with the sole purpose of killing the Doctor c) she gave up her ability to regenerate to save him--after first nearly killing him d) she becomes an archaeologist for the sole purpose of being able to track the Doctor and meet up with him from time to time which means taht since e) she dies for him then f) there is  **not a single moment of her entire life** when she is truly independent of the Doctor. Her entire life revolves around him, from before the cradle to after the grave. Irene Adler thinks she's playing Sherlock; but she falls in love with him too--even though she's supposed to be gay--and is therefore undone. They act like they're dominant. They often dominate the hero personally. But structurally, within the story, they are subordinated to the men they're attached to. 

This is even more true for Mary Morstan than it is for River Song or Irene Adler. When John is explaining to her about the client chair, what he says is that it's the place where people come and sit and tell them their problems and "we decide whether we want them." By sitting in the client chair, Mary will agree to give up her agency. She will no longer attempt to solve her own problems--Sherlock has ruined that for her--and instead hand them over to the men in her life, who will then solve them for her--IF they decide they "want" her. If you want a more concrete demonstration of what happens to her agency, well, the fact that Sherlock drugs her into unconsciousness before they head out on that last disastrous mission would be Exhibit A. (Yes. He drugs Mycroft too. But Mycroft is in that helicopter in the final scene, and he manages the entire conclusion. He took the same dope; but HIS agency survives.) The fact that Mary's past life and real name are burned up in the fire (the A.G.R.A. on that flash drive is an allusion to the Agra treasure that Mary was supposed to inherit from her father in  _Sign of Four_ ) and that the only identity she can now have is as John's wife, a.k.a. "Mary Watson"--a name she is structurally required to accept with tears and gratitude as a gift from her miraculously magnanimous husband--would be Exhibit B.

Also, Mary's now pregnant. Well, again, if you know Moffat Era Who, you know his ideas about women and maternity. I refer you especially to "The Doctor, the Widow, and the Wardrobe," in which strength is defined as the ability to give birth, and "Asylum of the Daleks," in which a supposedly twenty-first-century woman tries to break up with the husband she loves because she's unable to have children and she thinks he deserves a fertile wife. I'm not even going to touch Amy Pond's pregnancy, and will only glancingly bring up the fact that Eleven's ideal woman (at least the one who's not River Song) is a governess in one life and a babysitter in the next--though to be fair, Clara IS terrible at her job. So my guess is that, regardless of Mary's promises to "keep him in trouble," we will actually not see a hell of a lot of Mary in the next few seasons. She will be at home, taking care of the baby. Even though she is a ninja psychopath assassin.

And again: How did I predict that Mary had a past in international espionage? Because they actually tell us almost nothing about her  ** _except for the clues that are planted to prepare us for the bombshell reveal._  **We don't have to pick the clues out because Moffat has no interest in telling us anything about who Mary might be except for the solution to the mystery of her own past. And this is a function of something else many of us have observed about the Moffat era companions: they're mysteries first, and characters second. My guess is that Moffat will not have a lot of interest in Mary now that her Mystery has been Solved. 

So. I hated what Moffat did to Irene Adler; and I now officially hate what he did to Mary Morstan. It's not a surprise; but it is rather a disappointment.

As for what this episode means for the boys...well, John has decided to put his life in the hands of a psychopathic assassin. Sherlock's assurances that she truly loves him are, from an objective point of view, the merest bullshit. From an objective point of view, all Mary is necessarily doing at this moment is playing the long game. She's still, after all, 100% blackmailable; why should she kill the goose that lays the golden eggs? Let Sherlock live, let him bust his ass protecting John by protecting her, let him leverage Mycroft to do it, and that makes her as safe as she could possibly be. There's no reason in the world why that flash drive couldn't be blank. She says not to read it "if you love me," so if John looks at it, it's like admitting that he doesn't love her, which of course he's not emotionally prepared to do. There's no reason in the world why it shouldn't be a bluff. There's no reason in the world why she couldn't still be playing them both and biding her time. No reason except that I doubt that Moffat wants any of that to be true.

So in a world where John decides to take Mary back, it's I guess not that surprising that Sherlock is not at the top of his game. When, in "Reichenbach Fall," it looked to me as if Moriarty had him on the run, I was genuinely moved by his reactions. In "His Last Vow," I was most irritated by the fact that instead of coming up with some clever Sherlockian plan to outwit Magnussen, he decided to solve the problem by executing him at close range in front of witnesses. 

OK, we can explain that perhaps by his resumption of his drug habit; and maybe that's what really explains the way Moffat shoehorns the opening episode of "The Man with the Twisted Lip" (in which Watson goes out to an opium den to rescue Mary's friend Kate's husband Isaac Whitney from its clutches and happens to run into Holmes disguised as an opium smoker but not, I would just like to point out, actually strung out on opium) into a completely unrelated plot. Although he might also have done that purely to give Molly a chance to smack him around, because Moffat apparently thinks that's hot, or at least so one might conclude from the frequency with which one of his male protagonist gets himself slapped by a young and attractive woman. But at any rate: Moffat was so proud of gutting all the "Reichenbach Falls" feels by showing us that in the end Sherlock was never worried and had always thought rings around him from the very beginning. And now we're supposed to believe that the same man who orchestrated that caper managed to make himself utterly powerless (except for John's gun) against Magnussen.

But at least we have the Sherlock Gets Shot Feels! Only we don't. Or at least I don't, because for whatever reason, Moffat made the decision to convey Sherlock's experience of being shot with a ten-minute dream sequence in which his thought process is lavishly externalized moment by endless moment by a full cast of characters. And I just could not stop laughing. It was so overdone, so drawn-out, so self-indulgent, and so full of chewed scenery. And that just seems insane to me. Moffat has at his disposal one of the most decorated actors in Britain, playing opposite one of the most under-appreciated actors in Britain; and instead of trusting Cumberbatch and Freeman to generate the Grand Emotions on their own, he must create this enormous fantasy in which Sherlock signifies his desire to live For John's Sake by dragging himself up an enormous spiral staircase, nearly chewing the wood of the banisters as he groans in melodramatic agony. 

As for Moffat's final fake-out on the ending...well, that was basically terrible. I think it would be terrible even for people who love Moriarty and want him back. I wouldn't know, because I've always hated Moriarty, don't miss him, don't want him back, and earnestly hope that Moffat's reluctance to let dead people dead is not going to colonize the Sherlock universe.

Well, there it is. You wanted to know how I would feel after seeing "His Last Vow;" and this is how. Forget about little plot things like the fact that you really cannot blackmail people without documentation--England has libel laws, they are quite severe--and the making sense stuff that Moffat's never really cared about. Yeah, we have Sherlock and John's emotional primacy to each other reaffirmed in the traditional way--by triangulating it through a woman. Whee. For me, the price is too high. I would rather have kept the Mary of "Sign of Three." But at least I knew not to get too attached to her. 

******

On edit, February 7, 2014:

I liked “Empty Hearse” better on rewatch. I thought I’d see if “His Last Vow” improved on a second viewing.

It doesn’t.

It’s still entertaining. The acting is great, so much emotion from everyone involved, still love the client chair moment as an experience even though I hate what it means, but the problems just get worse.

For one thing, it’s clear on rewatch that Sherlock is genuinely surprised to find out that the woman about to shoot Magnussen is Mary and not Lady Smallwood. Mary later says he was “very slow.” No shit. He’s had months to work out what’s going on with Mary—the skip code, etc.—and never did it. I don’t mind getting there ahead of John; but I object to getting there ahead of Sherlock.

Sherlock says Mary “left the way she came.” Presumably this was Moffat fudging the fact that there actually is no way to explain how Mary gets into Magnussen’s office without John and Sherlock noticing. I suppose she climbed up the outside of the building, like the invisible spidey-ninja she is.

Sherlock warns Mary against shooting him at Leinster Gardens by telling him his body will be found in a building with her face projected on it. Because an ex-contract killer for the CIA wouldn’t be able to find the projector and disable it after shooting him.

Supposing she had decided to go ahead and shoot him…she would have actually shot John instead.

Because if the man Mary’s married to flips up his coat collar and ruffles up his hair and sits in the dark, she can’t tell that he’s not Sherlock. Makes you wonder how often she shot the wrong people.

Magnussen has his goons frisk Sherlock and John when he shows up at Baker Street. Nobody frisks John when he gets into the Magnussen helicopter, or when they get to Appledore.

And that final conversation on the tarmac.

It was just so anticlimactically pro forma. It’s as if the episode has actually exhausted itself at that point. So much Big Drama has happened on our way to that moment that Moffat can’t be bothered to take it seriously. John can’t think of anything to say? Sherlock bloody Holmes is about to disappear from his life, again, after shooting someone, in front of him, to save his wife, who’s still a mystery ninja assassin. I think nearly anyone would have SOMETHING to say in that situation. If it were real, which of course it’s not, because there will be that last-minute fakeout, so maybe that’s why Moffat basically yada yada yada-ed it.

And the ‘twist’ at the end…is still so awful. Not awful as in upsetting, just awful as in bad. Clumsy, ham-handed, tonally inappropriate, and just all-around stupid. 

Also, I can’t like Mary any more. I just can’t. Because I don’t trust anything we see from her. Oh well.

Take your time, Series 4. I can wait.


End file.
